Artificial Girl 3 Is Almost Feminist. For a Porn Game.

Artificial Girl 3 (Jinko Shojo 3) is the latest in the flagship series made by Illusion Software. Yes, this is the same company that made RapeLay (no, that’s not a typo and no, I’m not going to explain it), and several other games that are, well, we’ll say problematic. I also can’t speak for the other games in the series, because I haven’t played them. Artificial Girl 3, however, is amazingly feminist given the genre and the premise.

Before I continue, though, I think it’s important to understand my position. This is still a porn game. The purpose is still to create simulacrums of females in order to get your rocks off. Still, we can’t compare it to non-porn games, because it is a porn game. It benefits no one to compare it to something else, just like we shouldn’t compare an RTS to an FPS. If you’re expecting me to say the game is anything other than porn, you’ll be disappointed.

You start by designing your dream woman, and by “dream” I mean “graphical female you want to fuck.” You pick a look and shape, and you can create different clothing that she’ll wear for different situations (three guesses what got my attention), etc. You then can put up to five women in the little world, which consists of a few houses and landscape areas. You also assign up to three personality traits to the women, traits like “hungry” which up how often they need to eat, “Lewd” which makes them more amicable to sex and get turned on by different things than non-lewd women get turned on by, “Nocturnal” which changes up when they sleep, and so on.

The graphical interface consists of a little ball in the corner of the screen, one for each female. It changes to one of four colors: Blue for ambivalent, green for friendly, red for love/lust, and yellow for jealousy. It also tells you where in the world area the woman is. Once you put the woman in the world area, she just wanders around and does stuff. Her own stuff, by herself, without any input from you, and often women will have favorite areas. You want to have sex with her? You have to go to her. You have to get her to go from blue to at least green (unless she has the Lewd trait, but there’s more to it than that). But getting her to go to green nets you nothing more than masturbating her, and vanilla, missionary-style sex. How do you get her to green? You spend time with her. You sit down with her and eat dinner when she’s eating dinner. You hug her but don’t try to initiate sex (because she’s only ambivalent, not friendly). You go places with her. You sleep in bed with her. How do you get her to go to red? You do all that, and you consistently rock her fucking world during sex.

The woman’s orgasm, by the way, has nothing to do with the man’s orgasm. There’s also no meter that you can check to see if she’s enjoying herself. The only cues are her facial expression and the noises she’s making. She also won’t orgasm just because your avatar orgasms, and in fact sometimes your avatar’s orgasm makes her annoyed enough that you have to get her all wound up again. Given how much time and effort you have to put into getting her into the red, why bother if she’ll have sex with you anyway?

Because that’s the only way you’ll get her to have sex in certain positions. She’ll only give you a blowjob or ride you cowboy if she initiates. There’s no way for you to initiate and get those positions. Even if you put it on Easy mode and give the women the Lewd trait, you still have to get her into the red before you can get the unlockable sex positions. On top of that, certain things that would get non-lewd women horny won’t work with lewd women, which means you still have to work for it. As an example, getting naked in front of a non-lewed woman raises her horniness (while making her flee the area because you’re naked), but a lewd woman does not care, because nudity isn’t a thing to her.

There’s also a nod to safe sex. Depending on your relationship level and the personality traits involved, the woman may ask you to put on a condom. Yes, you initiate sex, and the woman stops you and tells you to wrap it up. The game does allow you to say no, sometimes, but doing so gives the woman the”‘Hard to Please” personality trait, which makes it nearly impossible to bring her to orgasm. The game actively punishes you by refusing to respect the woman’s request.

So what we’ve got is a Japanese porn game that connects your ability to have sex with a woman to your willingness to spend time with her and pay attention to her needs, allows for the idea of women having their own agency with sex, allows for the idea that women actually enjoy sex, and does not connect the woman’s enjoyment of sex to the man’s enjoyment of sex. And this comes from a culture where even porn showing consensual sex tends to look a little, well, rape-y. Sure, it’s a game where you create women for the sole purpose of fucking, and sure, even the relationship simulation is fairly hollow, but it’s there.

I just found it fascinating, and it makes me wonder what else could be done in the medium. Because a I’d love to see more porn games acknowledging the fact that women not only also like sex, but can decide when, where, and how to have sex without needing men to take care of the details for them.